Director Joe Carnahan Updates 'Bad Boys 3'

Bad Boys 3 is going to happen and Will Smith and Martin Lawrence are on board.

Director Joe Carnahan told The Collider that the script for what is being tentively called Bad Boys For Life is presently in re-write and if and when it meets everybody's approval the movie starts prepping. (It's officially slated for January of 2018, but that seems optimistic given who's involved.)

Carahan, who's directed Smokin' Aces and The Grey, says they will acknowledge in the plot that 15 years have past since Bad Boys 2.

We’re certainly not ignoring that, and that is a part of it. What happens 15 years on and where’s your life at now and what did you foresee yourself, it’s really rich material in that way. That part I’m really excited about, it’s a lot of exploring where are they now.”

Carahan also assured that he wasn't going to stray from franchise's R-rated roots.

I don’t think we’re trying to make a PG-13 version of Bad Boys. We haven’t discussed the rating, but both the other films were R-rated; Deadpool made $800 million globally and was an R-rated film, the new Wolverine is R-rated. I think these things don’t factor it, my theory is people gravitate more toward R-rated films than PG-13, I think the PG-13 thing is betwixt and between now. It’s not fundamentally rooted in any metric where you can go, ‘Okay, we can prove that this had success because it was PG-13.’ Look at the Matrix trilogy, that was wildly successful and they were all R-rated films. Unless things change, I think we’re making a Bad Boys film and that’s an R-rated movie.”